LETTERS; Rereading Stevens

Published: September 6, 2009

To the Editor:

Re Helen Vendler's review of Wallace Stevens's ''Selected Poems,'' edited by John N. Serio (Aug. 23): While I admire Vendler's insights (e.g., her recognition that Stevens oscillated lifelong ''between verbal ebullience and New England spareness''), I do not think she serves Stevens well through reductive biographical readings of a kind she would be unlikely to use on Yeats or Shakespeare. To suggest that ''The Snow Man'' might be titled ''Stoicism in a Failed Marriage'' and that the poem is one of Stevens's saddest is to narrow its range unnecessarily. It is also about the continual negotiation by the poetic imagination of the shifting territory between the human and the nonhuman; if it is sad it is also, in my experience, amazingly exhilarating.

DAVID YOUNG
Oberlin, Ohio
The writer is Longman professor emeritus of English and creative writing at Oberlin College.

To the Editor:

Helen Vendler mentions Wallace Stevens's ''Collected Poems'' of 1954 and the 1997 Library of America edition of his work, then goes on to praise what ''we have long needed, and now possess . . . a genuine 'Selected Poems.' '' But what of ''The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play,'' edited by Stevens's daughter, Holly, and published in 1971? For those of us who read Stevens in college in the 1970s, that was the text. If Vendler wants to dismiss this previous ''Selected Poems,'' she should at least say why, rather than omitting it altogether.

DAVID GALEF
Montclair, N.J.
The writer is a professor of English at Montclair State University.